About 3,400 hunters had registered for the 2014 coyote hunt of the Mosquito Creek Sportsmen's Association as of Wednesday morning, about two days before registrations will close at 11:59 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 20, according to Crystal Jones, membership secretary.

Registrations appear on track for at least as many hunters to sign up for this year's 23rd annual hunt as for the 2013 hunt, when 129 coyotes were harvested.

The Mosquito Creek hunt, which holds weigh-ins at the association's clubhouse near Frenchville, Clearfield County, begins at 12:00 a.m. Friday, Feb. 21, and will continue through 4 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 23.

For Pennsylvania's oldest and largest coyote hunt, weigh-ins this year will be held from 4-8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, Feb. 21-22, and 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 23.

A Cumberland County coyote weighing 51.2 pounds won the Mosquito Creek hunt last year.

It was shot at 7 a.m. the first morning of 2013's three-day hunt by Donn Reid, of Carlisle, while hunting with Mike Wonders, of Newville, running the electronic game call, and Brad Weston, of Newville, watching fields in a different direction.

That coyote was worth a top prize of $7,880 from total prizes of $31,520.

As they've done in previous years, several organizations are running their smaller coyote hunts concurrent with the Mosquito Creek hunt. Among them will be the St. Marys and Sigel sportsmen's clubs.

About two dozen organized coyote hunts are held across Pennsylvania each winter, accounting for several hundred coyotes removed from the population, which has nearly no impact on the status of the overall species across the state.

The Pennsylvania Game Commission estimates that Pennsylvania has more than 100,000 coyotes, of which hunters and trappers killed more than 30,000 each year without registering a significant impact on the coyote population.

Elsewhere in the U.S., particularly in the West, decades of eradication efforts – employing everything from bounties to widespread poisoning to shooting the animals from aircraft – has failed to decrease the animal's numbers.